This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialism―in terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic space―as intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome’s dominance in the Mediterranean. The introductory chapter lays out the postcolonial frame, drawing from the work of Edward Said among other theorists, and situates love elegy in relation to Roman Hellenism and the varied Roman responses to Greece and its cultural influences. Four of the six subsequent chapters focus on the rhetorical ambivalence that characterizes love elegy’s treatment of Greek influence: the representation of the domina or mistress as simultaneously a figure for ‘captive Greece’ and a trope for Roman imperialism; the motif of the elegiac triumph, with varying figures playing the triumphator, as suggestive of Greco-Roman cultural rivalry; Rome’s competing visions of an Attic and an Asiatic Hellenism. The second and the final chapter focus on the figures of Osiris and Isis, respectively, as emblematic of Rome’s colonialist and ambivalent representation of Egypt, with the conclusion offering a deconstructive reading of elegy’s rhetoric of orientalism.
Author(s): Phebe Lowell Bowditch
Series: The New Antiquity
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 340
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Note on Texts and Translation
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Reading Elegy Against the Grain
Introduction
Roman Love Elegy and Colonial Discourse
Chapter Descriptions
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Osiris, Egypt, and Postcolonial Ambivalence in Tibullus 1.7
Postcolonial Readings of Roman Imperial Texts
Romanizing the God Osiris
‘Primitive’ Egypt and the Stereotype of the Nile
Elegiac Osiris as the Amator and His Mistress
The Via Latina and Cultural Imperialism
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Elegiac Cartography and Roman Conceptions of Space
Cynthia’s Imperium Sine Fine: Propertius 2.3
Cynthia’s Itineraria in the Monobiblos: 1.8A, 1.11, and 1.12
From On High: The Triumphalist View in Propertius 2.10 and Tibullus 1.7
Map Reading and the Imperial Subject: Propertius 4.3
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Imperial Luxury and the Elegiac Mistress
The Pleasure of the Text: Propertius 2.16
Tullus the Voluptuary and Erotic Bliss: Propertius 1.14
Colonial Mimicry of the East: Propertius 3.13
Nemesis and the Commodification of Imperial Violence: Tibullus 2.3
German Wigs and the Discourse of Nativism: Ovid, Amores 1.14
Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Ars Amatoria III, and the Urban Woman
‘Going Native’: the Domina as Import Turned Roman Stereotype
Works Cited
Chapter 5: The Elegiac Triumph: Imperial Pomp and Erotic Circumstance
Eroticizing the Roman Triumph: Tibullus 2.3–2.5 and Propertius 2.1
Erotic Triumphalism and Cultural Plunder: Propertius 2.14
Public Triumphalism and the Threat of the Orient: Propertius 3.11
Cultural Plunder and the Anxiety of Influence: Propertius 3.1
Ovidian Triumphalism and Eastern Mollitia: Amores 1.2 and Ars Amatoria I
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Augustan Visions of Hellenism and Roman Imperial Identity
The Golden Age of Athens: Propertius 3.21
Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Oratorical Styles
Tullus and the Argonauts: Propertius 3.22
Imperial Plunder: Hellenistic Statuary and the Asiatic East
Rome’s Natural Right to Rule and the Chiaroscuro of Identity Formation
Works Cited
Chapter 7: Isis-Io, Egypt, and Cultural Circulation
Io and the Bovine Backstory of Egyptian Isis
Isiac Delia and the Mediation of East and West: Tibullus 1.3
Isis and Pelasgian Juno’s Pique: Propertius 2.28A and B
The Horning and Re-horning of Isis: Propertius 2.33
Cynthian Syncretism: Propertius 2.32
Abortion and the Resistance of the Colonized: Ovid Amores 2.12 and 2.13
Works Cited
Afterword: The Meroë Head of Augustus
Works Cited
Index
